Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer whose work combines adventure, moral duality and stylistic elegance. Chronically ill for much of his life, he traveled widely in search of health and eventually settled in Samoa. Treasure Island became the definitive pirate adventure story in English.
“I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house”
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) is Robert Louis Stevenson's book of poems spoken in a child's voice: rising by yellow candle-light in winter, watching rain fall on field and sea, playing at pirates, noticing a shadow, and blessing the world's abundance in the two lines of Happy Thought. Written while Stevenson often lived under the discipline of illness, the poems remember gardens, nurseries, and indoor days with affection rather than irony.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
The Black Arrow is set in England during the Wars of the Roses, when York and Lancaster fought for the crown and lesser lords changed sides as fortune moved. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is the young ward of Sir Daniel Brackley, a grasping knight who holds the Moat House at Tunstall and has grown rich by seizing other men's lands.
